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In December 2016, 22-year-old Dylann Roof was convicted on 33 federal hate crimes counts related to the June 2015 Charleston church shooting that left nine people dead. The news of his conviction revived a June 2015 conspiracy theory that the Roof was not who he was claimed to be, but rather was a former child star and crisis actor named John Christian Graas. A constellation of crisis actor rumors widely entered mainstream conspiracy theory after the Sandy Hook school shootings of 2012. Shortly after news of that earlier massacre broke, multiple persons connected to the tragedy (typically family members of dead victims) were accused of being crisis actors (i.e., professional actors supposedly engaged by government agencies and the news media to deceive the public about the reality of allegedly staged (also known as false flag) events, hired to convincingly portray persons in the throes of trauma and suffering). After Sandy Hook, iterations of the crisis actor claim were attached by online conspiracy buffs to virtually every subsequent mass shooting event, with numerous truthers attempting to out these potential plants by matching them up with images of persons who had no connection to those events. The Charleston church massacre took place on 17 June 2015, and in less than a week conspiracy theorists were asserting that accused shooter Dylann Roof was actually John Christian Graas, a former child actor who had appeared in several films and episodes of numerous television series (and who, according to the Internet Movie Database, enlisted as a U.S. Marine in 2010). One early version of the rumor held: The associated video clip documented only that Graas and Dylann Roof bore a passing resemblance to one another, its hardcore evidence hinging on facial similarities between Roof at the time of his 2015 arrest and Graas as a young boy in the early 1990s: (We could find no post-childhood photographs of Graas to use in a more relevant comparison.) Central to the conspiracy theory was Roof's bowl haircut, atypical for a man his age (21 at the time of his arrest) but common for a young boy such as Graas was during his acting career. Roof and the younger Graas both had a similar lip shape, but their noses were not similar, and while Roof appeared to have light green or blue eyes, photographs of Graas looked to depict a boy with dark hazel or brown eyes. (That latter discrepancy was typically shaded by contrasting color photographs of Graas with black-and-white images of Roof.) The shape of Grass and Roof's eyes also visibly differed. Another glaring hole in the conspiracy involved the respective ages and histories of the two men. While Roof was 21 in the photographs used as a comparison, Graas was at least 33 when the rumors that he was acting the part of shooter Dylann Roof first circulated. Roof was not born until April 1994, when Graas was already at the height of his childhood acting career: Graas continued to work steadily through at least 1999, around the time Roof would have been entering kindergarten, and was reported as having enlisted in the Marines in 2010. Roof's early life was thoroughly investigated after the shooting and documented an individual who had been on the grid during that period of time (not a persona that had suddenly been created around the time of the Charleston shooting). In profiles published after the shooting, references to Roof were found in 2008 court papers (related to a parent's divorce) that appeared alongside descriptions of his school records. Childhood friends also placed Roof in the school system and attested to relationships with him years earlier: Family members also provided accounts of Roof's early and later life to news outlets, many describing his alarmingly rapid transition from a young man with black friends to someone absorbed by white nationalist sentiments: Roof's former schools and his school records and acquaintances were also examined and reported on in mid-2015: Visual evidence presented to bolster the theory that Dylann Roof was child actor John Christian Graas was extremely weak, consisting largely of cherry-picked images showing Roof's child-like haircut contrasted with that of an actual child. But the details of Roof's childhood (which differ substantially from those of the much-older John Christian Graas) are far more more compelling evidence against the crisis actor theory than shaky picture comparisons are evidence for it.
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